Four New Them Teasers Unleash a Nightmarish Minstrel Show Monster

A batch of four unsettling short teasers for the upcoming Little Marvin horror/terror series Them have dropped, unleashing an ominous song from a mysterious nightmare character straight out of a minstrel show, crooning "What you gon' do?" as characters find themselves at culturally significant tipping points.

In the clip above, Deborah Ayorinde is a mother straightening her daughter's hair with a scaldingly painful practice commonly used in the 1950s, when the series is set, to better assimilate into judgmental white culture that would shame them for their natural hair. When her daughter's hair catches fire, Ayorinde seems entranced by images of a minstrel in blackface singing that song, and the little girl heartbreakingly turns to her and asks "do I look pretty now, Mama?"

In the clip below, Ashley Thomas is walking down a workplace hallway when a white man bumps into him and doesn't even acknowledge his presence. That crooner's voice once again asks "what you gon' do?" when he has to decide whether to say something to the man, and suddenly the walls are bathed in yellow, and he's subjected to a disturbing fright on the other side of a window.

The next clip features Shahadi Wright Joseph as a young woman possessed by the urge to literally paint herself white as images of high school torment engulf her.

And lastly, Alison Pill seems to view the arrival of the black Emory family in her suburban Compton neighborhood as comparable to finding a mold spot on her pristine wallpaper, and it sets her off something fierce. She doesn't get the sinister question, though. She gets a record-skip in her perfect ever-spinning carousel.

Them premieres April 9 on Amazon.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.